Windows 3.1 is still alive, and it just killed a French airport !

2015-11-13

"Windows 3.1 is still alive, and it just killed a French airport

A computer glitch that brought the Paris airport of Orly to a standstill Saturday has been traced back to the airport's "prehistoric" operating system.
In an article published Wednesday, French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné ,
(which often writes serious stories, such as this one), said the computer failure had affected a system known as DECOR,
which is used by air traffic controllers to communicate weather information to pilots who rely on the system when weather conditions are poor.

DECOR, which is used in takeoff and landings, runs on Windows 3.1,
an operating system that came onto the market in 1992.
Hardly state-of-the-art technology.
One of the highlights of Windows 3.1 when it came out was the inclusion of Minesweeper,
a single-player video game that was responsible for wasting hours of PC owners' time in the early '90s.

DECOR's breakdown on Saturday prevented air traffic controllers from providing pilots with Runway Visual Range information,
a value that determines the distance a pilot can see down the runway.
As fog descended onto the runway and engineers battled to find the origin of the glitch, flights were grounded as a precaution.

"The tools used by Aéroports de Paris controllers run on four different operating systems, that are all between 10 and 20 years old",
explained Alexandre Fiacre, the secretary general of France's UNSA-IESSA air traffic controller union.
ADP is the company that runs both Orly and Paris' other airport, Charles de Gaulle, one of the busiest in the world.
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